Dead Programmer's Cafe

Month: October 2003

  • Yeah, I’ll Have Some Recursion For Lunch

    Stepped out for lunch and saw a gigantic tow truck towing a smaller tow truck. Hmm.

  • The Dark Tower III

    One of my ongoing photographic projects is the creation on a full Tarot deck. So far “The Tower” has the most candidate photos.

    This is a smokestack of the Brooklyn College Heating Plant. It’s a very beautiful art deco structure. I’ll take more pictures later.

    A security guard hassled me when I took pictures of the Plaza Building. I need some good impressive looking paper to ward off clueless security guards. Or a copy of rules and regulations.

  • Mr Monk And The Mystery Of The Parrots

    The ubiquitous monk parrots live near the Brooklyn College power plant from the previous post. The grass near the athletic field is teeming with them. I wrote about the parrots before.

  • Yeah, I Know. It’s Lame. But Still…

    Khalid Shaikh Mohammed or Ron Jeremy?

    (left image from CNN.com, right from http://centerstage.net/)

    Senator Joe Lieberman (D-Conn) or Senator Palpatine (S-Naboo) ?

    (left image from http://www.hillnews.com, right from http://www.starwars.com)

  • Untitled

    There was an article in the New York Post today about a kid who attempted to “subway surf” to impress his friends and died. What exactly happened is rather unclear. The police say that he hit a girder with his head and died instantly. His “friends” say that the train hit a bump and he fell off. The morons didn’t even notify the conductor (they waited until the next stop) and the next train ran over the poor dude.

    There is an article about the “sport” at Village Voice with some photos:

    Of course that often leads to horrible heartbreak: a photo from the Post of the boy’s mother being comforted by an NYPD police officer and a captain (the captain has gold insignia on the shoulder) after a collapse.

    I think I know who the captain is (the picture in the paper was a bit clearer). It’s probably Karin Azadian, the commander of the Central Park Precinct precinct. I think she’s the only female captain in Manhattan Borough Command.

  • Soviet Voodoo

    Oooof. Finally fixed a rather nasty bug that was depressing me most of last week. This and a nice little poem by reminded me about a few superstitions of my childhood.

    There was no subway in Odessa, but we had buses, trolley buses and trams. Poorly printed pieces of bad quality paper served as tickets. The system was somewhat interesting: the driver wouldn’t check the tickets. You had to board with your own ticket and perforate it in a weird looking wall mounted press inside. If during a spot check you didn’t have a perforated ticket, you’d theoretically be fined. In reality everybody except the few unlucky loosers would perforate their ticket in the nick of time.

    So, back to superstitions and luck bringing rituals. Every ticket had a serial number. A lucky ticket was considered to be one, in which the sum of the first three numbers of the serial would be equal to the sum of the last there. If you found a lucky ticket, to gain some good luck, germ or no germs, you had to eat it. Here’s what one (actually this is an even more special palindromic lucky ticket.) would like:


    (image from http://iagsoft.nm.ru/ticket/chel2001.jpg)

    Then there was the “Chicken God”. That was a name for a beach pebble with a hole in it. The hole was supposed to be of a natural origin. A chicken god could be worn on a necklace. To wish on it, you would look through the hole at the sun (getting half blind in the process) and speak your wish.

    Update: tells me that they are called “Holey Stones” in the US and the tradition is somewhat similar.


    (picture from http://www.thegodsgrove.com)

    Oh, and the black Volga. In the Soviet Union a black Volga GAZ 24 was a car of choice for various party functionaries and other important people. A kid who’d spot one would usually mutter a little rhyme “black Volga my luck, which nobody can pluck” (“чернаÑ? Волга, моÑ? удача, никому не передача”). Hey, I am no poet.


    (image from http://autonavigator.ru/autocatalog/gaz/24-10.shtml)

  • Old Skool Plugin Technology

    Stuff missing from my collection: IBM vacuum tube plug-in logic modules. The damn things go for 70-80 bucks on eBay.


  • Conde Nast Antenna

    Just at the entrance to the lobby of the building where I work you can see this strangely framed view of the new Shively 6016-3/4 Master Antenna at the top of the Conde Nast building. The silhouette looks kind of like a B2 Spirit bomber, doesn’t it?

    The Conde Nast building is located at 4 Times Square. I guess they didn’t hear about the magic properties of number 4.

    Check out Shively Labs photo gallery of their projects. The view from the top of Conde Nast building is amazing.

  • “Top Secret / Majik Eyes Only” or Learn To Spell, You Spooks.

    Today after work I was vegging, watching a stupid UFO show on Sci-phi channel. They mentioned the Majestic 12. Then they showed this document from the FBI website, although I think they removed the giant scribble that says “BOGUS” from the page.

    Ha! It turns out Dr. Bush is so much cooler than I thought! He was one of the heads of the Majestic 12 and the inspiration behind the Cigarette Smoking Man (although he smoked pipes).